4 Comments
We’ve recently issued an NIH Guide notice to clarify when a grantee should report papers as an output of their grant in their progress reports, and help reduce administrative burden for investigators.
Awardees are only required to report papers that directly arise from their award (such as authorship, consulting with authors, preparing manuscripts, and running analyses reported in the publication). In other cases, awardees have discretion in determining whether their contribution justifies claiming credit for such papers. If awardees do list a paper in section C.1 of an RPPR or a progress report publication list of a renewal application, then they are responsible for its compliance with the NIH public access policy.
This notice implements a general principle about reporting papers: credit and responsibility go together. If an awardee claims credit for a paper by reporting it as a product of their award, the awardee also assumes responsibility for ensuring that the paper complies with the public access policy. Of course, if an awardee is so disconnected from a paper that they are not in a position to ensure the paper is posted to PubMed Central, that awardee should not claim credit for the paper.
Awardees are not required to track or report publications if their only contribution to it is through shared resources. Instead, they can opt to list and/or summarize these publications in section B.2 of an RPPR, in the appropriate sharing plan (Data Sharing Plan, Genomic Data Sharing Plan, Model Organism Sharing Plan Resource Sharing Plan, etc.) of their competitive renewal application.
Want more details or examples? Please see the Guide notice. Want one link that will help you determine how to report a paper and bring it into compliance with the public access policy? See http://publicaccess.nih.gov/determine-applicability.htm.
NIH research is for everyone. Because of the hard work of our investigators and our partners in the publishing industry, over a million people access NIH papers and others on PubMed Central each day. We appreciate your efforts in making NIH-supported research publications accessible to all.
This seems to contradict what we have been lead to believe. If a publication results from any direct funding from NIH, AHRQ, CDC, FDA, ASPR, DoD, DoE, NASA, NSF the public access policy applies.
Per the information above, “Awardees are not required to track or report publications if their only contribution to it is through shared resources. Instead, they can opt to list and/or summarize these publications in section B.2 of an RPPR, in the appropriate sharing plan (Data Sharing Plan, Genomic Data Sharing Plan, Model Organism Sharing Plan Resource Sharing Plan, etc.) of their competitive renewal application.”
This statement seems to give the ok for the awardee to not be held responsible to obtain PMCID as it is “too much work”.
What about the scenario when a co contributor on a grant gets a published article and credits the grant. The PI of the grant disagrees that the grant should have been acknowledged. Whose responsibility is it to correct this in with the publisher?
We are trying to educate all persons who could potentially be touched by PMCID; however, these contradictory statements make it difficult. Thank you.
We appreciate your question, because this can be a confusing area. If an awardee makes a resource publically available, and then another person writes a paper using that resource without any contact with the awardee, how can the awardee (or NIH) claim that the paper is a product of their award? After all, if the publicly available research product was a statistical technique instead of a dataset, we would not consider that paper directly supported by the award producing the statistical technique.
In the scenario you describe, the term ‘co-contributor on a grant’ does not have a specific meaning that we can connect to NIH policy. If it means the individual received support from grant and used their supported time to write the paper, then the paper is a product of the grant. The grantee is responsible for that paper.
There also are any other number of ways in which scientists can collaborate and where NIH support is not as clear. In these cases the awardee has some discretion in claiming credit by listing it in section C1 of their RPPR or the progress report publication list of their renewal application. If the awardee does claim credit, then they also assume responsibility for compliance with NIH polices. – Mike Lauer, NIH deputy director for extramural research, & Neil Thakur, program manager for the NIH Public Access Policy
Thanks for this change in protocol!
We have had, in the past, issues where students funded by training grant co-author a paper and, because they were funded by the training grant at the time, they listed the training grant in the acknowledgements. Suddenly the training grant PI (who had no idea the student was even working on the paper) finds themselves “out of compliance” and responsible for filing for a PMCID number for a paper they never heard of.
Actually, if the trainee worked on the paper while they were actively supported by the training grant, then that paper is considered a product of that training grant. Consequently, the training grant PD/PI awardee is responsible for bringing that paper into compliance with the public access policy. PD/PIs may find it easiest to track papers that they do not author in the Other Citations section of their My Bibliography. – Neil M. Thakur Ph.D., Special Assistant to the NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research